Between the meditative arrival of the friend of Roderick Usher and his panic-stricken exodus from the vanishing mansion there lies the story of the humiliation of reason within the palace of art. Like his counterpart, the curiosity-driven hero who descends into the maelström, the naive voyager who narrates "The Fall of the House of Usher" makes the special journey inward which demands a reversal of vision and a relinquishment of ego in order to attain what Emerson called "an invisible, unsounded centre in himself." Both explorers enter the deadly mouth of an apparently chaotic world and both explorers are confronted with the necessity for absurd choices in order to pass the aesthetic test and solve the problem in form posed by the dissolving house and the perilous whirlpool. While the maelström narrator deliberately descends into an aquatic version of the Gothic castle, the Usher narrator merely falls. The aesthete who surrenders to the fatal grip of the whirlpool is rescued by his veneration of form and actually ascends to a higher awareness of beauty, but the trespassing materialist who invades the House of Usher sets in motion a sequence of falls culminating in the destruction of the domicile of art itself, Usher' s ideal world which the narrator disparages as "the kingdom of inorganization." Within such a precarious kingdom of aesthetics the rationalist is clearly out of his element and he poses a threat to invisible order and higher beautiful form unless he can develop an aesthetic response to Gothic experience. Such a restructuring of attitudes is the primary transcendental accomplishment of the maelström descender while the refusal to see beyond the immediate Gothic hazards of his own concern for sanity and safety mark the Usher narrator as the tale's unconscious villain and the secret agent of disorder within inorganization's kingdom. In short, the House of Usher falls because the alien intruder fails to rise to a new consciousness of aesthetic responsibility. It is he and not the Ushers or their house who is both victim and victimizer although this inversion of roles is beyond the limits of the narrator's imagination.

The narrator's mansion sojourn is a Gothic ordeal for him precisely because he chooses to view it Gothically and to treat his analytic helplessness as conclusive evidence of a nightmare world full of insoluble Gothic dilemmas and governed by decay, absurdity, and death. What is beyond analysis must be intolerably fearsome to such a skeptical intellect. Like previous orphans of the castle in Gothic fiction, the Usher narrator regards his adventure as a typical Gothic entrapment and comes to see the Ushers as a pair of castle spectres. Once within the kingdom of inorganization, he consistently refuses to become a part of it and is an insider only in the superficial sense of being present as an observer. A master of external detail, he nevertheless fails to see the duty he owes toward the crumbling house and its febrile occupants. By his obtuse reliance upon reason he annihilates the prospective dreamworld and by his Gothic reactions to the double threat of madness and disintegration the narrator precipitates all of the falls in the story. No mere spectator or witness to the collapse of the house, he may really be the causal agent whose aesthetic insensitivity and rejection of visionary habits of seeing bring about the catastrophe of amorphousness at the climax of the tale. The more the narrator seeks to apply rational postulates to the mysteries surrounding the palace of art, the weaker the structure enclosing him becomes until the dreamworld melts into the tarn having been dematerialized by the alien visitor's obtuse perceptions of his mission at Usher. Most of Poe's best serious tales are concerned with how to see or how to expand visionary consciousness while making a fatal journey or while confined to the circumscribed turbulence of a Gothic building or chamber. In "The Fall of the House of Usher," Poe has written his grandest parable of defective vision and imaginative timidity, for in the voice of the storyteller we recognize the defeated rationalist who has violated the kingdom of aesthetics, who has sinned against the reality of the supernatural, and who has caused a resurgence of primordial chaos by his failure to use his imagination once he enters the portals of the palace of art. It has been observed [by James W. Gargano] that "Poe often so designs his tales as to show his narrators' limited comprehension of their own problems and states of mind." But nowhere in the Poe canon are the consequences of a narrator's imaginative deficiencies and his refusal to participate in the transcendental dreamworld that "lieth sublime, Out of SPACE—out of TIME" so complexly treated as in the vain quest of the Usher narrator.

Although many critics have called attention to the flawed mind of the Usher narrator, no student of the tale has yet argued that his presence within the House disturbs the fragile triangle of aesthetic order that still exists when he arrives. But in regarding the storyteller merely as a spectator or witness to the holocaust the crime of the narrator is overlooked and the inner meaning of the Usher narrator's flight from the kingdom of inorganization is missed. Thoroughly horrified and Gothified by the weird events that he thinks he has witnessed, the Usher narrator deserts the palace of art at the crucial moment and refuses to succeed Roderick as the future artist-monarch over this kingdom of dreams. Aesthetic heroism involves a willingness to remain within the House not as a guest or as a skeptical investigator but as a new resident who is prepared to put the quest for beauty ahead of all mortal considerations. But unlike the maelström descender who saves himself by seemingly dooming himself, the friend of the Ushers is incapable of the act against reason and selfpreservation that can disclose a world of higher form amidst Gothic turmoil. For him, the case of the Ushers remains unsolved while his own imaginative cowardice is never examined. He handles internal or psychic events as if they were external happenings and in his effort to reconstruct the experience he omits the most significant fall among the seven falls that occur in the story: the collapse of his own arrogant confidence in the infallibility of reason as a shaping power. As it disappears into the tarn, the House is both a symbolic reminder of the faulty psycho-architecture of the rationalist and an emblem of a permanently lost world within the narrator himself. For all of its factual minutiae and medical data, the narrative itself remains a perplexed fragment of what really took place at Usher,—the distressed monologue of a frustrated analyst who can see parts but never the whole. In the poem, "Dream-Land," Poe had reflected upon the fact that divine unity can only be reached through the dreamer's irrational crossover into the regions of sleep. "Never its mysteries are exposed / To the weak human eye unclosed." It is the "weak human eye unclosed" of the Usher narrator which distorts the value of the fatal experience and transforms a potential dream of beauty into a fragmentized Gothic nightmare for himself.

By concentrating upon the narrator's abuse of the dream experience we may be able to answer in aesthetic terms several provoking questions which "The Fall of the House of Usher" poses concerning the superiority of the synthetic over the analytic outlook in Poe's hierarchy of mental functions. If the House of Usher finally falls because of the reluctance of the narrator to submit to the dream experience and to unite himself organically and spiritually with Roderick Usher's kingdom of aesthetics, we can extend this hypothesis to a pair of Dupin-like questions about the anti-imaginative voyager's true position in the aesthetic scheme of the story. First, what kind of criminal is the Usher narrator and where does he belong in Poe's catalogue of maniacs? And second, what is the exact nature of the crime and punishment of this [man who, in Barton Levi St. Armand's words, is an] "unwilling initiate who has failed to comprehend the significance of the Mysteries he has witnessed and the passion-drama in which he has participated?" Such an approach means that the story really belongs to the narrator and is far more about his unknowing desecration of the palace of art than he himself realizes. Ironically, the fearful disintegration which he believes has overtaken and swallowed up the Ushers and their House has actually befallen the blasphemous pilgrim whose attempt to impose a rational control over his sojourn is a failure.

The architectural cataclysm of the sinking of the House into the tarn is preceded by several anticipatory falls. Beginning with the fall of the narrator's eyes into the dark unyielding mirror of the tarn, each subsequent fall is the result of his attempt to order the transcendental world by applying rational criteria and each fall further undermines the palace of art. In arranging for the narrator to move through a sequence of seven falls Poe may have had in mind a septenary design for the story to suggest the perversion of aesthetic vision by a non-believer who rejects seven chances to ascend to the throne of art. The numerology underlying the seven falls has a deep religious significance just as the one life shared by the three bodies of Roderick, Madeline, and the House is a bizarre play on the doctrine of the trinity. In their order of occurrence, the seven falls may be enumerated as follows: the peer downward into the "remodelled and inverted images" of the tarn, an initial invitation to see all that lies over the tarn in reverse; the narrator's Gothic interpretation of the "Haunted Palace" rhapsody in which he thinks he detects "the tottering of his [Usher's] lofty reason upon her throne," when it is actually the narrator's own rationality which is beginning to fall; the dropping of the narrator's spirit into Gothic premonitions of sleepless horror and his overpowering by terrifying noises as he struggles within the solitude of his apartment "to arouse [himself] from the pitiable condition into which [he] had fallen, by pacing rapidly to and fro" in his unconscious mimicry of Roderick Usher's "hurried, unequal, and objectless step;" the twin falls featured in the Gothic inset legend of Sir Launcelot Canning, "'the head of the dragon, which fell before him'" and the brazen shield adorning the castle wall which "'fell down at his feet upon the silver floor, with a mighty great and terrible ringing sound'," the repeated double fall of Madeline atop Roderick in a ghastly parody of the classical sexual posture as she "fell heavily inward upon the person of her brother;" the outer fall of the dream edifice into the tarn, the visible result of the narrator's chaotic impact on the palace of art; and the inner fall of the narrator's selfassured belief in the power of reason as he flees "aghast" from the Gothic crisis his mind has created. The multiple connotations of falling throughout the story again suggest the narrator's aesthetic delinquency and his capitulations to Gothic terror. From each successive trial of the imagination the purely analytic temperament recoils in horror until it literally fragmentizes the visionary opportunity of beholding primal unity. What we see through the eyes of the narrator at the end of the tale is precisely what we see through his eyes as he studies the facade of the House at his arrival: a confusing spectacle of disparate parts that lies beyond his depths.

Clearly, it is the prolonged gaze downward into the tarn, the probing of the depths of self, that furnishes the clue to all of the other inversions of reality contained in the story. Within the so-called kingdom of inorganization all of the laws of empirical reality are reversed. Much madness is divinest sense, stone truly is alive, the dream power supersedes the waking state as a route to knowledge, illusion takes precedence over reality, and dying by diving into the image of the House shimmering in the tarn becomes the preferred mode of behavior. A total immersion of his mind in the beckoning pool of imagination followed by further attemps to fuse himself with the dreamworld of the Ushers ought to prevent all of the various falls. By conjoining himself with the kingdom of inorganization he could then endow his words with the poetic energy required to sustain the structure through [what Poe defines in "The Poetic Principle" as] the "rhythmical creation of beauty." Indeed, it is the unnamed narrator's duty, just as it is the esoteric obligation of all potential visionaries and dreamers in Poe, to merge himself with the higher world through the power of words. In the cosmic fantasy, "The Power of Words," Poe has the celestial voyager, Agathos, show his companion, Oinos, how wisdom and beauty must be sought in "the abyss of nonentity." Agathos proclaims the law of opposites by which the suicidal hero can transform various kingdoms of inorganization into trancendental paradises. His powerful words to Oinos correspond almost exactly to the sort of mystic appeal exerted by the tarn upon the inquisitive yet hesitant Usher narrator. Agathos says, "Look down into the abysmal distances!—attempt to force the gaze down the multitudinous vistas of the stars, as we sweep slowly through them thus—and thus—and thus! Even the spiritual vision, is it not at all points arrested by the continuous golden walls of the universe?—the walls of the myriads of the shining bodies that mere number has appeared to blend into unity?" Descending and not falling then, first with the physical eye and then with the entire mind and soul is the proper path for the Usher narrator to follow as he contemplates the individual particles that compose the Usher universe. But in his thoroughgoing hostility to reverie, he does not tell or order events properly. In his very way of remembering his nearly fatal occupancy of the mansion he uses the power of words negatively to demolish the palace of art.

The Usher narrator's crime, therefore, lies in the manner of the telling. From the first words of the overture passage in which he fights off the temptation to fall asleep and to enter the magic castle as a reverent dreamer, the tone of his account never goes beyond the traditional Gothic hero's emotions of horrified perplexity and a losing struggle with the tenebrous and demonic forces which hold him prisoner. His vocabulary is an unpoetic mixture of the medical and the hysterical as he speaks a language highly inimical to the poet's idiom. Habituated to classification, he clings desperately to the old diction falling back upon such terms as "hypochondriac," "maladies of a strictly cataleptical character," "restrained hysteria" and "settled apathy" to protect his reasoning self from the absurd possibilities which intimidate his "lofty reason." Or in describing his dire situation he retreats into the maudlin rhetoric of the typical Gothic victim who finds himself cut off from air, light, and hope in the bowels of some murky Gothic dungeon. Such phrases as "the hideous dropping off of the veil," an echo of the major device of suspense in Mrs. Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and "there sat upon my very heart an incubus of utterly causeless alarm" not only revert to the frantic style of the English Gothic novel from which they are derived but underscore Poe's stress upon the verbal constrictedness of the narrator. Plainly, his power of words is limited to two inadequate voices: the voice of the scientistanalyst-physician which wants to busy itself "in earnest endeavors to alleviate the melancholy of [his] friend;" and the voice of the Gothic victim who dreads live burial just as much as one of Monk Lewis's incarcerated maidens and who longs to escape from the haunted castle before it can consume him. Recital of the tale within the confines of these two voices is an act of destructive retrospection. Rather than serving as a verbal defense against encroaching madness, his words deprive him of the artist's insight. Standing in bewilderment on the threshold of chaos and nothingness at the close of the tale we are left to ask the romantic poet's question which the narrator declines to utter: "Whither is fled the visionary gleam? / Where is it now, the glory and the dream?"

By failing to reflect deeply enough upon the mystic signal given to him by the tarn to "invert and remodel" his consciousness the narrator dooms his quest to failure from the outset. All that will now befall him as he proceeds across the tarn and penetrates the head of Roderick Usher will by its very nature be irreducibly symbolic like the stylized movements of a religious ritual or self-exploratory dream. By venturing boldly through the sleeping mind's Gothic corridors the acolyte of beauty might eventually pass into a higher degree of wisdom and share the mysteries of the castle. A passage in Freud's work On Dreams explains the process of inversion which accompanies the transition through which the narrator passes when he enters the dream temple of art and is "ushered" into "the presence of his master." For Freud, the reversal of vision induced during the dream state leads to a "new unity," the proper goal for the Usher narrator within the kingdom of inorganization.

Ideas which are contraries are by preference expressed in dreams by one and the same element. "No" seems not to exist so far as dreams are concerned. Opposition between two thoughts, the relation of reversal, may be represented in dreams in a most remarkable way. It may be represented by some other piece of the dream content being turned into its opposite—as it were by an afterthought. We shall hear presently of a further method of expressing contradiction. The sensation of inhibition of movement which is so common in dreams also serves to express a contradiction between two impulses, a conflict of will.

By ignoring the law of opposites as projected in the tarn reflection he brings himself into direct conflict with the artist-ruler of the inner world and by clinging to empirical categories he menaces and finally destroys the poetic entity symbolized by the House. The narrator's failure to invert the Gothicism of his experience also justifies Roderick Usher's desperate epithet, "'MAD-MAN,'" because from Usher's point of view the visitor has not grasped the salvational law of opposites upon which the palace of art rests and has lost all contact with the aesthetic realities of Usher's dreamworld. Both the painting and the poem within the poem, "The Haunted Palace," are efforts on the part of Roderick Usher to reveal to the narrator his own shortcomings but he overlooks the selfreflective quality in these symbols just as he cannot or will not allow himself to be converted to the law of reverse vision on the brink of the tarn.

If the universe of Roderick Usher is a pure poetic abstraction that can be imagined into existence, it then follows that it can be reasoned out of existence by an uncooperative observer who repeatedly reduces the whole to parts or fragments by his way of visualizing the challenge of the Gothic fortress. Although on the edge of annihilation, the architectural and psychological parts of the House of Usher nevertheless do possess a totality when the House first comes into the narrator's view. Just how heavily strained the delicate triangle of order is when he beholds its face is indicated by the zig-zag fissure which scars the House's countenance. The slightest disturbance of the taut harmony underlying the aesthetic composition of the House and owner will insure the destruction of the whole. Mysteriously, and contrary to any known physical law, the structure of the House as well as its interior synthesis are literally kept in place by an exertion of Roderick Usher's poetic imagination. Conversely, the imagination of the artist is held in place by the palace of art. By an imaginative analogy which defies all of the analytic speculations of the narrator Roderick Usher is like a poet and his House is like the divinest structure of the mind at its highest condition of creation, or like a poem. Such a relationship can be discerned only by discarding sensory prejudices and Gothic fears in order to see the House and master synthetically. Between Usher and his House there is a tension that is both creative and fatal, a private universe of form resting upon the supra-rational principle of the perfect psychic congruity of the two worlds of mind and matter. For the Usher narrator to understand his aesthetic obligation toward this precarious oneness he should immediately embrace the dreamer's timeless selfless perspective. For only a reversal of rational safeguards and a release of the imagination can preserve the coalition of art and artist symbolized visually in the fragile condition of the House and its lord. Roderick Usher's imaginative vitality, long burdened by such immense creative strain now stands threatened with a breakdown. The atrophy of Usher's aesthetic energies is accurately diagnosed by the narrator as a downward pressure of the senses upon his mind, "a morbid acuteness of the senses" accompanied by "a host of unnatural sensations." Sensing that his imagination cannot maintain the balance much longer, Usher has summoned his friend in the hope that he will be able to envision the artistic problem in form and will then ascend to Usher's stewardship of the mansion as new keeper of order in the kingdom of inorganization. If Usher can somehow transfer the responsibility of imagination to the skeptical and frightened visitor, as indeed he tries futilely to do, then coherence and unity might be retained and the kingdom of aesthetics continue to stand though Usher himself perishes.

It is precisely such an absurd collaboration between the external structure of the House and the internal structure of a sensitive and gifted mind that the puzzled narrator cannot or will not acknowledge. Seeing such a connection would require not only a suspension of his Gothic preconceptions toward the frowning and ominous castle which rises up before him, but also an absurd decision, the cardinal act against reason which enables certain Poe questers to elevate their identities by choosing death over life. What the House demands of its tenants is not siege or conquest but the outré reverence of the artist who is willing to dwell inside the timeless and tenuous world of the poem.

None of these duties are perceived by the Usher narrator.

During his analytic appraisal of the grim visage of the House he is much taken with its "vacant eye-like windows," an overt organic feature dating back to the incredible aliveness of architecture in Gothic fiction as well as a masonic sign made to him by the House to go "beyond [his] depth." Chagrined by the eruption of certain irrational dreads within himself the narrator's feelings are much like those of any typical Gothic victim contemplating the horrors that await him within the haunted castle as he approaches its sinister bastions. But if the law of reverse vision is applied, the stare of the House is not vacant but replete with sentience and not merely eye-like but genuinely ocular in its urgent appeal and invitation to the narrator. As the contest of eyes continues the visitor's eye travels to the base of the House where there lie "a few white trunks of decayed trees," a brilliantly surrealistic image of bones scattered before a mighty stone face. Since Poe ends "The Fall of the House of Usher" by echoing a passage from Ezekiel 43:2 ("And his voice was like the noise of many waters") it seems plausible given his sense of singularity of impression that he has chosen to begin the story with the image of the wanderer in the valley of the dry bones. And given the ironies of the narrator's own rational madness the House ceases to be an objective reality in his mind's eye and becomes a traumatic projection of his own secret insecurities and desires. Somewhere behind the apparent Gothic hideousness of the House's "Arabesque expression" there lurks an occult totality which the narrator can sense but cannot articulate in scientific language. Unable to tabulate the Gothic data before him into a logical whole or to reduce his wild feelings to a formula he is obstinately committed to putting things in their right order as he probes for an explanation: "What was it—I paused to think—what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher?" Shortly thereafter, his scrutinizing eye will single out the "barely perceptible fissure," the ultimate fractional detail in a mental picture consisting of disquieting fragments. The more intently he gazes the more diminished his vision grows as his unsympathetic outlook and the power of his words accelerate the sublimai processes of disintegration already at work within Usher's kingdom of inorganization.

Once inside the House itself the Usher narrator pursues a campaign to determine and relieve the malady of the Ushers. Having shaken off the temptation to dream and to see in reverse he assumes that he is still in the "real" world although his unexpressed Gothic fears that the House can see, feel, think, and change shape at will continue to trouble him. Unwittingly, he is the author of a series of miniature falls which lead to major deterioration of aesthetic sensibility at the climax. The narrator's close analysis of Roderick Usher's head, for example, is a repetition of the facial perusal undertaken by him prior to the glance into the tarn. And just as he misreads the symbolism of the House by failing to enter into the attitudes of the dreamer, so he misjudges the symbolism of Usher's forehead and eye. The cranial details which the narrator reports form a composite of pallid Byronic outcasts and Gothic men of feeling. The strange virility of Monk Lewis's Ambrosio, the crepuscular grandeur of Mrs. Radcliffe's Montoni and Schedoni, the cryptic eye of Beckford's Vathek, the equivocal handsomeness of Byronic heroes such as Cain and Manfred, the preternaturally powerful voice of Brockden Brown's Carwin in Wieland (1798), and the wild hair and volcanic eyes of Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer seem to have coalesced in the super-human features of Roderick Usher, Poe's penultimate reproduction of the English Gothic villain. While the desperate malice of the Gothic tradition's satanic hero appears to be perfectly duplicated in Usher's Gothic face, Poe has inverted the meaning behind this mask of evil. Transplanted from the pages of the Gothic novel to the contorted phrenology of Roderick Usher the standard Gothic face loses all previous moral significance as an index to the struggle of good and evil within the tempest tossed soul of the Gothic novel's tormented tormentor. What the Gothic face symbolizes in the inverted context of Usher's world is not guilty anguish coupled with an all-consuming passion for evil but a terminal fatigue of imagination. Although he resembles the Gothic villains outwardly Usher's inner tension is much closer in kind to a wasted figure such as Kafka's hunger artist. For the attentive observer, the face of Usher spells out the intimate nexus between creativity and death. The miraculous organ of sight in particular, Usher's "eye, large, liquid, and luminous" contains the answer to the riddle of survival within the house of art. Preoccupied with his medical inspection of Usher's extraordinary cranial properties, the narrator does not make the vital symbolic connections between Usher's eyes and the tarn. The tarn is also "liquid and luminous" and a deeper look into its depths will lead to illumination for the quester. Introspection of Usher's remarkable face will also illuminate and carry the observer beyond the horror to a new depth of soul. Certainly, there is no more compelling facial image of the exhausted artist to be found in Poe's work as he has converted the conventional grimace, glare, and pallor of the Gothic novel's evil men into a figure of aesthetic depletion. When the narrator notes that the "finely moulded chin" shows "a want of moral energy," he once more reveals his inability to see symbolically and his reluctance to go deeper than the literal levels of experience. He is guilty of moralizing over Usher's features when the eye like the tarn is exerting the key command to "invert and remodel" in order to transcend horror.

Further analysis by the narrator is bound to push art and artist into a disastrous disharmony. Yet, with each phrase that he utters about his host's head, or Madeline's cataleptic peregrinations, or the Gothic acoustics which seem to be approaching a hellish crescendo, he weakens the artistic structure and falls further into aesthetic insanity. With each degree of descent into the whirlpool the maelström descender was able to beautify the horrible through the power of words; his philosophical opposite, the Usher narrator, insists upon Gothicizing all that is potentially beautiful within the palace of art. Having twice been confronted with his aesthetic alter-ego, first in the face of the House and then in the face of the host, he denies himself the higher identity that the maelström decender achieves. Looking at the various falls he causes, it is possible to see the friend of Usher as a satiric embodiment of the "heresy of The Didactic" to which Poe [in "The Poetic Principle"]attributes a debasement of the sense of the beautiful. Although not wholly lacking in imagination, the narrator distrusts it as an impractical and dangerous faculty. To use the imagination is to indulge in a "somewhat childish experiment" that can only deter the moralist from his mission to save the Ushers from their peculiar disease. Vexed by a twinge of the irrational within himself as he gazes into the tarn he quickly makes a rational recovery to scan "more narrowly the real aspect of the building." This counterpointing of vision and revision is the basic psychological pattern into which the narrator's mind falls throughout the story. And nowhere is his vacillation between imaginative action and rationalistic reaction so destructive to the kingdom of aesthetics as in the central conversation he has with Usher concerning the preposterous theory of inorganic sentience.

Usher's heady discourse on "the sentience of all vegetable things" is perhaps the most complicated moment in the story for the narrator. For him, Usher's impassioned disclosure of this wild theory is the omega point of unreason in "the mental existence of the invalid." In reviewing the incident with his customary factual precision the narrator admits that he "lack[s] words to express the full extent" of Usher's bizarre ideas. In all other respects, the narrator's recollection is complete:

I well remenber that suggestions arising from this ballad led us into a train of thought wherein there became manifest an opinion of Usher's which I mention not so much on account of its novelty (for other men have thought thus), as on account of the pertinacity with which he maintained it. This opinion, in its general form, was that of the sentience of all vegetable things. But, in his disordered fancy, the idea had assumed a more daring character, and trespassed, under certain conditions, upon the kingdom of inorganization. I lack words to express the full extent, or the earnest abandon of his persuasion. The belief, however, was connected (as I have previously hinted) with the gray stones of the home of his forefathers. The conditions of the sentience had been here, he imagined, fulfilled in the method of collocation of these stones—in the order of their arrangement, as well as in that of the many fungi which overspread them, and of the decayed trees which stood around—above all, in the long undisturbed endurance of this arrangement, and in its reduplication in the still waters of the tarn.

To the narrator, the psychological damage of such bold imaginings is obvious in the impending insanity which threatens Usher. He conceives of his duty to be the relief of such psychotic enthusiasm in order to prevent a total disunity of self from overpowering his friend. Because Roderick Usher knows that his own reign over the kingdom of inorganization is about to end, the supreme task in his view is the successful transfer of aesthetic trusteeship to the narrator, his potential artist-successor. But the mere possibility that the House is far more than a physical structure, that it is the living symbol of all artistic endeavor and higher imaginative activity, is so repugnant to logic that the narrator must dismiss the idea as mad or risk madness himself. Never understanding that Usher's belief in the aliveness of the House is absolutely valid inside the inverted world he cannot take this crucial conversation seriously. Instead, he extends his earlier "feeling half of pity, half of awe into a moral contempt for such eccentric ravings. All chance for aesthetic rapport with Usher is lost as the narrator rationalizes away the wild lecture by abruptly declaring that "such opinions need no comment, and I will make none."

Sometime previous to the discussion of organic sentience Usher must have attempted to convince his guest of the truth of this supernatural proposition, for the narrator remembers that he was "enchained by certain superstitious impressions in regard to the dwelling which he tenanted." Earlier examination of his patient has also led the narrator to conclude that Usher's environmental delusions are cannibalizing his sanity. His morbid anxiety, for example, is diagnosed by the narrator as "an effect which the physique of the gray walls and turrets, and of the dim tarn into which they all looked down, had, a length, brought about the morale of his existence." Communication or an alliance between the rational and the aesthetic sensibilities is imperative at this pivotal point in the tale if the balance between artist and work of art is to be restored. Furthermore, it is vital that the outside narrator now go beyond his former depths and engage freely in unreason in order to assume the House's legacy. He must quickly consent to take Usher's place for if he procrastinates or moralizes, then the energy-starved mansion will drain off Usher's dwindling power of words. That is, the architectural organism will overfeed itself, the creation will turn upon its creator, and the aesthetic universe of the Ushers will revert to an inchoate mass. To see his appointed part in such a non-rational crisis means of course that the narrator would have to transmogrify both his vision and his vocabulary. But the narrator lacks the poet's daring; he will not pursue his own anti-rational impulses to a fulfillment of form; he cannot give himself over to that absurd gesture of faith in irrational descent which brings revelation. According to the law of opposites as fixed by the tarn mirror, Usher's eyes, and the colloquy on inorganic sentience, it is the narrator who is indeed the Gothic madman of the tale. If the palace is haunted, it is haunted by the phantom of reason. The term, "inorganization," which ambiguously refers both to inorganic substance such as stone and metal and to disorder or disorganization is also subject to the law of reverse vision which governs the House of Usher. Beheld with the imaginative eye, the kingdom of inorganization becomes the exact reciprocal of itself,—a kingdom of transcendent order or a poetic unity. Beheld as the narrator beholds it via the "weak human eye unclosed," it is indeed a chaotic spectacle.

After the crucial and abortive conversation with Usher, the negative forces represented in the narrator cause the remainder of the tale to deteriorate into Gothic melodrama. Premature burial, cadaverous resurrection, diabolic sound effects, a mounting spiral of terrified helplessness, lurid radiance, visceral disturbances in the Gothic substructure of the building, and the mandatory tempest all precede the narrator's expulsion from the castle. Rather than simply escaping from his Gothic predicament, the vain quester is literally disgorged or vomited forth by the submerging House as if he were some profane, foreign object. Also before his flight from the mansion all further demonstrations of inverting and remodelling assume a Gothic form. For example, the imbalance between art and artist, between the microcosm of poetic structure and its dying god, is now evidenced by the horrific fact that House and Master are beginning to exchange their metabolisms. Upon examining his patient on their last fatal night together in the House the narrator is astonished to discover that "throughout his whole countenance there reigned a stony rigidity" [italics mine]. Such a symptom of petrifaction is not just an indication of the onset of some weird variety of rigor mortis although such a paroxysmal stiffening would by no means be an unexpected medical development. What is unexpected, however, is the Gothic fact that Usher and his House are trading bodies in a perverse defiance of all the laws of nature. As Usher becomes progressively stony and inorganic, his counterpart and other self, the House, becomes increasingly corpuscular, plastic, and organic until the point of oversaturation is reached and the House liquefies into primal nothingness. With this final unbalancing of the equation between thought and feeling or between science and art, a universe comes to an end and a god is dead. And the party responsible for the aesthetic tragedy is the disconcerted narrator who entered the House of Usher with such noble intentions.

As for the lethal embrace of brother and sister, their posthumous reunion might compel the narrator to abandon his spectator's role and look beyond the ghastliness of this supernatural event. But once more his inability to use his imagination when faced by a Gothic crisis keeps him from seeing the reunion as something more than Madeline's retribution upon her incestuous sibling, the necro-rapist raped and murdered by his undead sister. The narrator has already experienced a visual analogue of the sister atop the brother in the image of the House astride its reflection in the tarn. In a higher sense, this death clasp is yet another "combination of very simple natural objects" whose mystic principle of arrangement eludes the rationalist. It never occurs to the narrator as he watches this horrible liaision that the House and its patrons are making a final plea to him to look beyond the horror he is now witnessing and rise above his spectator's role. Can be afford to take the absurd risk of remaining within the House at this climactic moment and become the new sovereign of the aesthetic realm? Looking to his own mortal survival, his tone is typically horror-struck as he recalls this gruesome Liebestod which completes his nightmare and drives him from the citadel of his innermost self. Gouted with blood and energized with a superforce from beyond the grave that is reminiscent of Ligeia, Madeline "bore him to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated." So reads the rational deposition of this erstwhile doctor in residence now become makeshift coroner. He remains unenlightened to the fact that what he has concluded about Usher's extinction really applies to the higher aspects of himself, for the capacity to dream Poe's dream of supernal beauty is forever shattered.

The sudden appearance of the "blood-red moon" wedged into the fissure and boring like some mad eye through the corroding masonry of the House is a final Gothic beacon in which all previous signs and hints of aesthetic lunacy come to a destructive focus. In signalling the fall of the rational consciousness, the eye-like, crimson orb is a fine objective correlative for the narrator's own eye and gaze throughout the story. His fascination with the ruby moon as it seems to trickle down the gaping wound on the face of Usher's House like some impossible bubble of blood oozing from fractured stone is a last instance of mishandled symbolism. What he sees as an objective event is in truth a subjective event for he is now looking back upon his own fragmented consciousness or his own internal collapse. As denoted by the lunar eye, he is both the "red slayer" of Emerson's famous poem ["Brahma"] and the slain. But none of the internal meaning of his symbolic experience within the kingdom of inorganization is clear to him. In Marginalia, Poe would write: "It is the business of the critic so to soar that he shall see the sun." Since solar revelation is Poe's figure for critical lucidity, the lunar opposite at the finale of "Usher" must symbolize aesthetic consternation and loss of self. Pausing again on the edge of the tarn to survey the world which he has helped to destroy (actually he is scientifically curious about the nature and origins of the "wild light") the House dematerializes within his mind's eye. The Biblical overtones inherent in the signature of the "long tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters" imply that the Day of Judgement is at hand—certainly a day of damnation for the once-proud reasoning self. Like the earth itself on the eve of creation, the House of Usher is "without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep."

As shown in the seventh fall in the final paragraph of the story, the Usher narrator's quest terminates in a grotesque cul-de-sac for the inquiring mind as the dreamworld disintegrates. Rationally depressed, verbally exhausted, and scientifically frustrated, he will never again be able to enjoy the Todestraum or dream of creation through death. While his fellow voyager, the intrepid mariner who descends into the maelström, designs his higher experience within the Gothic vortex to his own visionary satisfaction, the Usher narrator cannot stabilize or unify the imaginative elements of his adventure into the dark center. The limited central intelligence who repeats the tale within the tale that is "The Fall of the House of Usher" is hopelessly alienated from the aesthetic wonders of the universal mind and overwhelmed by feelings of rational impotence. According to Maurice Lévy, "The vocation of Gothic heroes is essentially that of losing their way" Standing in awe on the "safe" and solid periphery of the liquid and lethal domain of art, the vain quester is not just another anonymous Gothic hero who has lost his way but the ultimate outcast of Poe's private universe.